Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea

by Sarah Besky

Overview

What is the role of quality in contemporary capitalism? How is a product as ordinary as a bag of tea judged for its quality? In her innovative study, Sarah Besky addresses these questions by going inside an Indian auction house where experts taste and appraise mass-market black tea, one of the world’s most recognized commodities. Pairing rich historical data with ethnographic research among agronomists, professional tea tasters and traders, and tea plantation workers, Besky shows how the meaning of quality has been subjected to nearly constant experimentation and debate throughout the history of the tea industry. Working across fields of political economy, science and technology studies, and sensory ethnography, Tasting Qualities argues for an approach to quality that sees it not as a final destination for economic, imperial, or post-imperial projects but as an opening for those projects.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520303249
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Series:	Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century , #5
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the ILR School at Cornell University. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair Trade Tea Plantations in India.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Production of Quality
1 • The Work of Taste
2 • The Auction and the Archive
3 • The Problem with Blending
4 • The Science of Quality
5 • The Quality of Cheap Tea
6 • The Quality of Markets
Conclusion: The Endurance of Quality

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Tasting Qualities is a persuasive ethnography of quality and its many unseen constituents."

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"A fascinating view of the Indian tea industry. . . . Manages to easily deconstruct and demystify the space between the plantation and the cup of tea."

Tea Journey

"A wonderfully layered and immaculately researched exploration of the enduring tastes of empire."

Allegra Lab

"A stimulating account of Britain’s favourite drink."

Times Literary Supplement

"[Besky's] nuanced study of Indian tea . . . is a refreshing brew of botany, business and culture."

Nature

"Engages deeply with the theoretical aspects of assessing the quality and value of commodities through the lens of tea."

CHOICE

"Tasting Qualities will be a beneficial read to a broad range of scholars with interest in food, labor, and commodity studies, the intersection of food, nutrition, and health knowledge, science and technology."

Culture & Society Food

"Besky offers anthropologists and other interdisciplinary scholars an ethnography to teach, think with, and push their studies of work, agriculture, finance, and commodities a bit further toward our collective understanding of quality."

Exertions

"Provides an unusual and rich understanding of the process of creating, reproducing, and evaluating the quality of tea."

American Anthropologist

"With a fine eye for detail and sparkling writing that makes the seemingly mundane fascinating . . . Tasting Qualities is a highly original, deeply researched, and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of Indian tea’s modernity, which adds to the scholarship on commodities and capitalism."

Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society

"Combining ethnographic and archival description, Sarah Besky’s Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea cleverly turns an analytic lens on the dependable and standardized aesthetics of modern capitalism."

American Ethnologist

"With a fine eye for detail and sparkling writing that makes the seemingly mundane fascinating . . . Tasting Qualities is a highly original, deeply researched, and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of Indian tea’s modernity, which adds to the scholarship on commodities and capitalism."

Isis

"[Besky's] nuanced study of Indian tea . . . is a refreshing brew of botany, business and culture."

Nature Lib